But the fact that no one else seems to be willing to tells me something about our so-called “immigration debate”.

I’ve posted about this before, but I’d like to go over these points again to help you understand what is really going on and so you can speak to others with your thoughts more or less organized, that is, with a fuller understanding of the forces in the background that really are shaping this issue.

First, a little history. After the end of WWII, the industrial West experienced a burst of economic growth and prosperity, led by the USA which had emerged from that war essentially untouched and with its industry intact. The peoples of western Europe and North America experienced industrial and financial good times and the growing middle classes, like middle classes everywhere, set out to methodically take advantage of this economic bonanza. They stopped having kids so they could better enjoy this brave new world. It wasn’t just America that wanted the American dream, it was the world. The Dream meant a good job, either Union and government regulated and protected high wage industrial employment, a cushy office slot shuffling paper, a white-collar retail or a position in management, the bureaucracy or the professions. Education became inexpensive due to government subsidies, and class barriers in Europe and racial ones in America were systematically dismantled. Government planners realized this new corporate welfare state benefited everybody, and politicians that administered it could get re-elected. Besides the posh job, the American dream also featured a detached house in the suburbs (with a yard!), an automobile, consumer goods and appliances, and a college degree for the kids so they could carry this prosperity with them into the future. The technology and production efficiencies developed during the war (at public expense, with borrowed money) made this all possible. And the loans were easily paid off with inflated post-war dollars. We all know the story, many of us experienced it directly. My working-class single-parent family moved from a government housing project to our own mass-produced suburban tract house and our first brand-new Mercury sedan, and six short years later I became the first person in my family to go to college.

To a certain extent, this happened all over Western Europe, too. Everywhere, the new middle classes took over, the old aristocracies collapsed, and even the lot of the poor improved, with a real chance of being able to move up the social and economic ladder for all. But there was a downside: we can’t all work in the front office. Somebody has to do all those ugly, low paying jobs that nobody else wants to do, and the new employment generated by wealth and technology was making it expensive to hire somebody to do them. Soon, many trades and occupations became difficult to fill, nobody wanted to work in them and they certainly didn’t want their kids to work in them either. The First World started experiencing a labor shortage because nobody wanted to work at shit jobs for shit wages any more, and because of the drop in the birth rate. When labor becomes a scarce commodity, Supply and Demand suggests salaries should go up to make the difference. But that was not allowed to happen.

The solution was immigration. The UK started bringing in grunt labor from the Commonwealth, and other European countries started importing workers from their former colonies. Algerians for France, Indonesians for Holland, Moroccans for Spain. In Germany, the “guest workers” from Turkey provided the cheap labor. The Communist East had to erect an Iron Curtain to keep their populations from flocking to these new jobs in the prosperous West. Africans and Asians had no such barrier. In the US, the black worker now found opportunities in the great urban centers of the North, and vast numbers of agricultural workers from Mexico did the farm work that could not be mechanized. All over the West, but particularly in America, the prosperous advanced economies became more and more dependent on imported, cheap labor. Not only would these newcomers work for nothing, and they would not agitate for better working conditions or higher wages, but they also depressed wages for everyone else. Business needed immigrant labor to keep unemployment up, and consequently, salaries down. The Law of Supply and Demand, remember? The authorities looked the other way, it was good for business.

Today, the domestic worker, the son or grandson of immigrants, is now beginning to see a crisis. He is starting to see his own comfortable middle class white collar job threatened by automation, globalization and foreign competition. At first it was assembly line work, now it is skilled trades and even professional, management and administrative positions. The upper level jobs are going overseas, and overseas workers are competing for the. lower level jobs. And business is learning that not only are Mexican fruit pickers cheaper than American ones, Pakistani and Hindu engineers and programmers are cheaper than the locals too.

Even temp and seasonal work is affected. As a college student in the 1970s I often worked summers in the construction trades. So did many of my fellow students. The pay was good, even for unskilled casuals and helpers. Construction sites were mostly manned by hippies, long hair tucked up under their hard hats. Just think, those pampered, over-educated, pot-smoking, draft-dodging over-privileged kids out in the hot sun, busting rods, walking steel and pouring mud. Go by a construction site today and everyone is speaking Spanish. The usual excuse is “Americans today won’t do that kind of work.” That is a fucking lie. They’ll do it. But they won’t work for shit wages. And they will quit if they aren’t treated fairly. The Mexican worker, trying to maintain his family (here OR abroad) in an environment that can have him deported at any moment if he “causes trouble” will take whatever he can get, and work his ass off.

We have an immigration problem because conditions are so bad in some foreign countries that people are willing to put up with any kind of hardship here rather than stay where they are. This fear is then exploited by local employers, and the entry-level, manual labor and temporary positions that could go to citizens are now done much cheaper by “illegals”. The illegals are here because they have been invited here, and because they are being exploited here. Its a new form of slavery, and it not only abuses the slave, it impoverishes the native born citizen. Our so-called immigration problem is not a problem at all, it has been deliberately designed to work the way it does because it provides a cheap form of labor for business. They make it illegal for the immigrant to work here so they’ll keep him scared and controllable. But they won’t do enough to keep him out altogether because they profit from his misery. And the present system has the added benefit of providing a means of mobilizing dispossessed American workers by appealing to their racism and economic distress. It is a system of infinite greed, cynicism, cruelty and hypocrisy. And it is bi-partisan. The Republicans need wage slaves, the Democrats need voters. But both are too stupid to realize that those they are exploiting are perfectly aware of what is happening to them, and who is responsible. A reckoning is long overdue

The immigration problem would vanish overnight if we simply enforced the existing laws about hiring undocumented workers. Sure, we could implement temporary visas and work permits for critical industries like agriculture. This would protect foreign workers from criminal exploitation and give them protection under the law. And it would take time to put into motion the legal structures needed to enforce the hiring laws, this would give employers, and the immigrants, the time to adjust. The enforcement process would be expensive (although it would be mostly administrative) and run by agencies that already exist for that purpose. We don’t need a Wall, or concentration camps, or more border SWAT teams. We just need a few fines and jail sentences. Remember, we don’t have to prosecute every crooked boss in America, if we just lock up a few the word will get around in a hurry.

Will the effective banning of illegals cause prices to rise? Of course it will. But the prices will then reflect the true cost of the goods and services these slaves produce for us, and we will have more jobs so we will be able to afford those higher prices.

Maybe I’ve missed something, but I’d be happy if someone pointed it out to me. In the meantime, I have little choice but to believe our so-called “immigration debate” is a phony conversation, static, to cover up the real issue. There is no immigration problem, it is a situation that his been deliberately constructed so a very few very rich people can get even richer at everyone elses expense.